<font style="font-family: tahoma,sans-serif;" size="2">The wrong name, Frank Davidson Brown was put on my great uncle William Arthur Brown&#39;s birth certificate in West Derby registration district, England. The story was that

it was done by a nurse &quot;who
was not a total abstainer;&quot; <span class="il">Frank</span> <span class="il">Davidson</span>
had died a little prior to his birth and she got the names mixed up!<br><br>Valerie Stern<br></font><style>@font-face {
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<div>We are so use to having our name assigned at birth and changing it taking a
lawyer and court costs. I have found that prior to 1900 (and maybe even
after) people changed their names for a whole lot of reasons. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>I know my grandmother&#39;s birth name was Diamond but she did not like
that and used Opal and had her mother swear to Opal on a delayed birth
certificate.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>My uncle was named Harry Maine Coldren Jr. but after his father left the
family, he used Harold Max. As far as I have found there were no paper
work here. I think he had his mother state that Harold Max was his correct
name. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>I found a case in the manuscript file at NEHGS where A.A. Aspinwall
was writing trying to fit a man into the correct family in his Descendants
of Ezerkiel Mayne. He was corresponding with the son of a man supposedly
from Rennselear County. He wrote that he could find no record of a
&quot;Robert Preston Maine&quot; in Renneselear. The man later wrote back
that he had talked to his father and that the father was really &quot;Samuel
Deane Bishop&quot; but when he moved to Albany [all of 50 miles from his
home] he did want to be associated with his family because they were
all drunkards. So when he moved he started using a new name. There were no
court records. [Names were not correct because I do not have the papers in
front of me.]</div>
<div> </div>
<div>As for having a child nameless for a couple of months, sometimes they
wanted to be sure it would live. I have seen children listed as &quot;baby&quot; for
a while before a name shows up. Cannot tell if they had the name all along
and no one used it or if they could not figure out what to name the child and so
just waited. This was especially true if families who went to churches
that did not practice infant baptism so there was no hurry to name the
child.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Julia Coldren-Walker</div>
<div> </div>
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